In one month, thousands of spectators will be bussed in from Qualcomm Stadium in San Diego to Torrey Pines Golf Course’s South Course and witness a first – a truly municipal course* hosting the U.S. Open, which will take place June 9-15.
The course isn’t new to tournaments. It has served as the location of the Buick Invitational each winter since 1968. But this is a new high for the course that sits on Pacific coast.
From the time it was announced the course would host the tournament in 2002, until Mark Woodward, golf operations manager for the city of San Diego was hired in 2005, little beyond normal maintenance was done to ready the course. Woodward, who was hired specifically to prepare the course for the U.S. Open, had his work cut out for him.
Still, the course was in better shape in 2002 than it was in 1990, when local businessmen started a campaign to bring the U.S. Open there. After site visits, the USGA didn’t see the course as worthy, so the men convinced 26 people to chip in $3 million to improve the course. The city threw in another $1 million and the “Open doctor,” golf course architect Rees Jones, was hired to redesign the course. It resulted in renovations to tees, greens and bunkers. This helped change the U.S. Open committee’s minds.
More work needed to be done before the Open, and that’s where Woodward came in. But before he could get to the turf, he was tied up in the political struggle of creating a five-year business plan for the city courses, which created additional tee times for public golfers and generated $3 million in additional revenue from 2006 to 2007. Once that was in place, Woodward focused on the conditions at Torrey Pines.
“A lot of what was done happened during the past 18 months,” he says.
That included converting all the fairways to kikuyagrass, overseeded with ryegrass.
“We basically had to spray all the fairways and kill all the grass,” he says.
The greens were converted from bentgrass to Poa annua.
To help with the grow-in, a tee-to-green cart path was installed and a tree program was instituted for the first time. This consisted of removing trees that provided too much shade on greens or were unsafe, such as Eucalyptus trees. A few of the course’s namesake trees, the Torrey pines, were moved with a 100-percent success rate, Woodward says. Other improvements included the purchase of $1.5 million worth of equipment, and upgrades to the clubhouse, maintenance facility and parking lot.
Besides being the first municipal course, Torrey Pines also sets the record for the longest U.S. Open course. After newly added yardage on the No. 13 hole, the course can be played at 7,600 yards. Other changes, mandated by the USGA include moving the No. 4 fairway closer to the ocean, adding bunkers and adjusting a landing zone to receive balls better.
This is Woodward’s first time working with the USGA and leading the charge for a U.S. Open. He led preparations for the Buick Open, but the stakes are higher now.
“For the Buick Open, the greens on the South Course were 11 on the Stimpmeter,” he says. “For this one, they will start at 12 to 12.5 and as they firm up they will get close to 13.”
From March until this week, the 18-hole North Course had only nine holes open to the public so 400,000 square feet of tents could be constructed there. Now the entire course is closed for preparation. The South Course will follow suit May 21, and USGA agronomist Pat Gross will ramp up his visits to the course from every two or three weeks to daily.
About 80 volunteers will start rolling in June 8 to help the 30 current crew members to prepare the course. They will come from throughout the world, from as far away as Japan, and from many states, especially Arizona, where Woodward is from.
“It’s kind of a fraternity of people who come to help out,” Woodward says. “They want to come out and be a part of it, even though they’re doing things like fixing divots, repairing ball marks or mowing fairways. They just want to be a part of the U.S. Open inside the ropes.”
*Bethpage State Park's Black Course in Nassau County, N.Y., was the first publicly owned course to host a U.S. Open in 2002, but it is part of the state park system. Torrey Pines is the first municipally owned course to host the event.
